Wednesday 24 October 2012 10.35 EDT
First published on Wednesday 24 October 2012 10.35 EDT

Barack Obama's re-election team is making an all-out push to reach undecided voters in Ohio in the hope that the president's superior ground operation will give him the edge in the vital swing state despite tightening polls.

Obama for America, the re-election operation masterminded in Chicago, is waging the most intensive ground operation in US electoral history in Ohio. It has blanketed the state with 125 field offices and is sending out an army of volunteers, backed by the latest digital technology, to hunt down the 3% of voters who have yet to make up their minds.

The Obama campaign has built its ground game on the back of his first run on the presidency in 2008, providing an almost unbroken presence in Ohio in stark contrast to the relatively new operation that Mitt Romney has created from scratch over the past six months. Democratic organizers hope that such long-term commitment to the state will give them an advantage as the election enters the final stage devoted to getting out the vote.

The latest opinion poll from Quinnipiac University and CBS News shows Obama hanging on to a five-point lead in Ohio by 50% to 45%. But that has come down following his poor performance in the first presidential debate from a commanding advantage of 10 points just a month ago, and any further slide would see the state enter a statistical tie.

To prevent any additional drift, the campaign is piling resources into Ohio. Among the big names parachuted into the state in recent days were the double act of Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen. Another double act – that of Obama and Joe Biden – took the stage in Dayton on Tuesday.

At a local level, the final stretch of the campaign is being buoyed up by celebrities of a slightly more modest hew. Volunteers in the college town of Bowling Green in north-west Ohio were treated to a visit by Crystal Bowersox, an American Idol finalist best known for her white dreadlocks and her penchant for appearing barefoot.

She may not be in the same league as the Boss, but Bowersox was able to fire up the volunteers. "You guys know what's at stake, otherwise you wouldn't be here," she said to a gathering of about 30 volunteers, mainly women, about to go out canvassing.

"Being a woman is not a pre-existing condition, and we reserve the right to choose. Taking away the right to contraception is a terrible threat to women trying to sustain themselves financially."

Talking to the Guardian, Bowersox said she was informed by her own personal experience. Born in nearby Oak Harbor in Ohio, she was dependent on government subsidy for healthcare when she was struggling as a musician – and she gives thanks to welfare and Medicaid in the cover notes to her first album, Farmer's Daughter.

"I'm a different tax bracket now, and I've seen both sides of the fence. But I'm still grateful for the help I got when I was dirt poor," she said.

The Obama canvassing operation in Bowling Green, as in other key constituencies across the country, is powered by a sophisticated set of digital tools developed for this election cycle called Dashboard. This takes the Democratic party's database, Vote Builder, which contains personal data on millions of individuals, and connects it to volunteers knocking on doors.

By so doing, it allows for an increasingly fine-tuned targeting of core voters. Committed conservatives and Romney supporters can be discounted as it is not worth spending time trying to persuade them.

Instead, Dashboard directs canvassers to the doors of firm Democrats who can be encouraged to vote early, which is an advantage to the campaign because it means that more effort can be focused on election day on getting wavering voters to the polls.

'Good data can be the difference between winning and losing'

The Obama for America re-election campaign is claiming that it has built up a substantial lead in early voting so far. Jeremy Bird, the national field director, put out a memo this weekend in which he said: "President Obama is winning early vote among primary election voters in the key battleground of Ohio."

The contention appears to be born out by a slew of polls that has Obama ahead among those who have already cast their vote. One by SurveyUSA, for instance, put Obama ahead by 19 points among early voters.

Joe McNamara, Democratic president of Toledo city council just to the north of Bowling Green, says the concentration on early voting could win Obama the state. "Get people to the polls now and you can concentrate your forces on those who haven't decided yet."

McNamara says the Obama ground game is more organised than any election he has ever seen. "They are all about the data – where to knock, what the responses were, who has voted early, who needs a ride to the polls. Having good data can be the difference between winning and losing."

The Obama office in Bowling Green, a college town, is running daily golf carts to carry students form campus to the early polling stations. But most of the team's energies are being directed, with Dashboard's help, towards the undecided voters upon which the outcome of the election in Ohio will depend.

"We know that turning up in person is far more effective than the millions of dollars being spent on TV ads this year," said Emily Garcia, an 18-year-old student at Bowling Green State University who is devoting 20 hours a week to the campaign. "People appreciate that we are taking the trouble to talk to them in their homes."

Through Dashboard, Garcia is directed – theoretically at least – to the doorsteps of the undecided voters. The technology draws on past voting behaviour, data scraped from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, occupation, age, gender and other demographic details to estimate individual's likely voting position.

It doesn't always work. The first door Garcia knocked on on Sunday afternoon was an older woman who complained: "What do you want? I didn't order pizza." She turned out to be a committed Romney supporter.

But the second door was a hit. Craig Flack, 25, is an evangelical pastor with a Bowling Green congregation and has yet to decide which way to vote on 6 November.

He knows how valuable a political catch he is. "I'm like a unicorn in Ohio – one of the 3% of Ohio voters everyone wants to talk to," he said.

Contrary to the popular image of the undecided voter as being ignorant and unengaged – a recent Saturday Night Live skit captured the stereotype brilliantly – Flack is a political science graduate who is following the race closely. He voted for Obama in 2008 but says he has grown disillusioned.

"Like everyone else I drank the Kool-Aid – it was all going to be peaches and cream. But after four years where's the hope and change?"

He is now torn between the candidates. On the one hand, he is very worried about the size of the national debt and what he perceives as Obama's failure to bring it down; on the other he likes the president's healthcare reforms and doesn't want them to be repealed. "I don't think you should have to go broke just because you fall sick."

Garcia tries to entice Flack into the Obama camp as they stand debating on his doorstep. "I totally get that the deficit is a big thing, but the economy Obama inherited was totally destroyed. Four years is not enough to fix that – give him another four and he'll get the deficit down."

"But no human being gets to live like that," Flack replies. "We have a budget in my church and in my family, and we have to stick within it. We can't just keep on spending."

They part with Flack still undecided, though he professes to be "leaning Obama". He may regret making that comment, as it will almost certainly earn him many more calls and visits from Garcia and her fellow Obama volunteers before this race is done.